This package is free to use under the Elastic license. It contains open source
and free commercial features and access to paid commercial features.
Start a 30-day trial to try out all of the
paid commercial features. See the
Subscriptions page for information about
Elastic license levels.

X-Pack will try to automatically create a number of indices within Elasticsearch.
By default, Elasticsearch is configured to allow automatic index creation, and no
additional steps are required. However, if you have disabled automatic index
creation in Elasticsearch, you must configure
action.auto_create_index in elasticsearch.yml to allow
X-Pack to create the following indices:

If you are using Logstash
or Beats then you will most likely
require additional index names in your action.auto_create_index setting, and
the exact value will depend on your local configuration. If you are unsure of
the correct value for your environment, you may consider setting the value to
* which will allow automatic creation of all indices.

By default, Elasticsearch runs in the foreground, prints its logs to the
standard output (stdout), and can be stopped by pressing Ctrl-C.

All scripts packaged with Elasticsearch require a version of Bash
that supports arrays and assume that Bash is available at /bin/bash.
As such, Bash should be available at this path either directly or via a
symbolic link.

Elasticsearch loads its configuration from the $ES_HOME/config/elasticsearch.yml
file by default. The format of this config file is explained in
Configuring Elasticsearch.

Any settings that can be specified in the config file can also be specified on
the command line, using the -E syntax as follows:

./bin/elasticsearch -d -Ecluster.name=my_cluster -Enode.name=node_1

Typically, any cluster-wide settings (like cluster.name) should be
added to the elasticsearch.yml config file, while any node-specific settings
such as node.name could be specified on the command line.

The archive distributions are entirely self-contained. All files and
directories are, by default, contained within $ES_HOME — the directory
created when unpacking the archive.

This is very convenient because you don’t have to create any directories to
start using Elasticsearch, and uninstalling Elasticsearch is as easy as
removing the $ES_HOME directory. However, it is advisable to change the
default locations of the config directory, the data directory, and the logs
directory so that you do not delete important data later on.

Type

Description

Default Location

Setting

home

Elasticsearch home directory or $ES_HOME

Directory created by unpacking the archive

bin

Binary scripts including elasticsearch to start a node
and elasticsearch-plugin to install plugins